: Health Benefits of Honey

[Guest guest]



World of Honey

Health Benefits of Honey

Health Benefits of Honey – Introduction

Look, the thing I want to do now we’re talking about health benefits of honey is to give you some plain facts and get rid of all that hype you will see all over the internet, usually on web sites that are trying to sell you honey. If you buy some honey as a result of the information here – great! But actually the real reason for this web site is that I want to share with you my real fascination with bees and honey.

One of the problems with honey is that it is a very complex substance. According to the Nursing Times in 2008, a paper by Stefan Bogdanov of the Swiss Bee Research Center estimates that it contains some 600 components. Even today, research hasn’t solved all of its mysteries. We have a whole history of stories going back literally thousands of years about how people have used honey to cure a wide range of ailments – but not all of these cures have so far been backed up by scientific research. At least not so far. New research is being carried out all the time.

What this means is that some of the health claims made for honey, although not proven scientifically today, may be proven tomorrow. But of course there are many claims that will no doubt be discredited as well. So what I’m going to do on this page is to take a look at some of the (as yet) unproven claims that people make for what honey can do, and then look at the health-giving properties of honey that for which we have some solid scientific evidence. First of all, though, let’s take a look at how we humans have used honey through the ages:

A Short History of Honey

The first recorded use of honey that we know of is on a fragment of clay tablet found in Sumeria (now an area of southern Iraq), dating from about 2500BC. They had no paper in those days and used clay slabs instead to record just about everything, which is just as well because paper would have been long gone by now and we would never have known about this important civilization. Anyway, the text on this tablet describes an ointment for wounds where one of the ingredients was, you guessed it, honey.

By the time we reached 1500BC, the old clay tablets had gone the way of the steam engine and the Egyptians recorded everything on the world’s earliest paper, or papyrus. Miraculously, some of these records survived until modern times, don’t as me how, and one of them, known as the Egyptian Ebers Papyrus mentions the use of honey to heal wounds.

Between 460 and 377BC the ancient Greek Hippocrates, known as the “father of medicine†described in his extensive journals how he used honey combined with other natural ingredients for treating wounds, ulcers and even hemorrhoids.

roman soldiers used to carry honey in their medical kits for dealing with wounds, and the use of honey in this way was common in India and China in ancient times.

The Bible mentions honey many times, mainly as an essential food rather than a medicine, but the Koran, dating from about 650AD, mentions honey’s healing properties.

Now we go to England – the year is 1403 and we are in a field just to the North of the medieval town of Shrewsbury where the infamous Battle of Shrewsbury battle is taking place. The Royal surgeon Bradmore, in his diaries known as the Philomena, tells us what happened to Prince Hal during this bloody battle. The prince received an arrow wound to the face and the arrowhead remained embedded in the wound (ouch). The surgeon had a special pair of iron tongs made which he planned to insert into the wound and screw into the socket at the back of the arrowhead, allowing it to be pulled out. To get the tongs in, he needed to enlarge the hole, which he did by carefully forcing in wooden rods of increasing diameter infused with rose honey (double ouch!). Anyway, the plan worked, and the arrowhead was removed! The surgeon then applied an ointment of flour, barley, honey and oil to what you can imagine would have been a nasty wound. Soon, Prince Hal made a full recovery, and later went on to become King Henry V